Good Music

Essay

I remember the underground pop culture of the 90s. Indeed, I prefer to think of that time as an archive now — albeit one consigned to a series of digital files, not actual libraries. This recent Twitter stream from my friend Brandon serves as a good encapsulation. (I joked to him that his feed could be nicknamed Shit My Dad Says: 90s Alt-Rock Edition.) Or you can visit YouTube, a trove of nostalgia that brings you closer to the source of what it was really like:

This weekend’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, which I’ll admit I (regrettably!) attended only Saturday felt more like a living library curated by none other than 90s icon Jim Jarmusch. There’s advantages to the livepart well enumerated in the article links embedded in this sentence. And there are disadvantages only hinted at in the brief half-life of a Twitter hashtag.

Catching up with the 90s, though, is not why I usually go to rock festivals. For example, I go to Coachella to discover what the 16 year olds are wearing these days. Read more »